Open Access Toolkit

About This Guide

This guide was developed by the University of Canberra Library staff.

In preparing this guide information was gathered from numerous Open Access guides available in this area. Our thanks go to our colleagues in the Open Access community, especially the University of Western Australia.

Under LibGuide agreements the material in this guide can be shared by the LibGuide community. The material may also be re-used for non-commercial purposes beyond LibGuides however we ask for acknowledgement and notification from the user.

What Open Access Means

Open Access (OA) is the idea that publically funded research should make its outcomes accessible for the public to see.

OA journals are often peer-reviewed.

They are published the same way as standard journals.

The costs of producing and distributing are shifted from those who want to access the material, to those who produce the material. Often this is paid for from grant funds or the institution may provide an open access repository.

Benefits?

More exposure for your work

Practitioners can apply your findings

Your research can influence policy

Complies with grant rules

Researchers in developing countries can see your work

(CC-BY Danny Kingsley & Sarah Brown)

OA has three main components:

Author(s) retain copyright

Author(s) grant permission for others to access and distribute the work

The work is made available for free online

What's In It For You?

Open Access makes research results freely available to anyone with an internet connection rather than keeping those results hidden behind a subscription paywall.

Open Access exposes your research to a wider audience and makes it easier for other researchers to find and cite it.

In the real world

There are thousands of OA journals, but some journals and publishers are more open than others; some are hybrid offering select articles as OA, while others are less open again. This spectrum of publishing options is charted in'HowOpenIsIt'.

Signing a copyright transfer agreement with a publisher does not necessarily stop an author from making their work open access as there are two different approaches to Open Access Publishing, known as "Gold" and "Green" publishing. TheOpen Access Publishing page in this guide has more information on these.

Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) Blog

Peter Suber On Open Access

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.